Bullets

U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin

Ordinarily, few jobs in the legal world are as exalted and exhilarating as being a United States Attorney. But last week Tim Griffin, the recently installed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, was not enjoying his new assignment. “It’s no fun being me right now,” he said over his cell phone from Arkansas. Griffin is one of eight U.S. Attorneys whose recent appointments by the President are at the center of a political controversy that has overtaken Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top Bush Administration officials. They stand accused of manipulating the prosecutorial arm of the federal government for political purposes, and then misleading Congress about it. Griffin complained that his Democratic opponents had unfairly accused him of political partisanship. “I worked in a campaign, like a lot of people,” he said. “But now my job is not partisan, so I am not partisan.”

Griffin, who is thirty-eight, was appointed U.S. Attorney in December. A former research director for the Republican National Committee and an aide to Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, Griffin had relatively little prosecutorial experience. Nonetheless, e-mails between Justice Department and White House officials show that Bush Administration officials pushed out Griffin’s well-respected predecessor, H. E. (Bud) Cummins, to make room for Griffin, in part because “it was important to . . . Karl [Rove], etc.” Griffin did not undergo a confirmation process before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as is required by the Constitution. Instead, the President appointed him under a little-noticed provision of the 2006 renewal of the Patriot Act, which allows for the indefinite appointment of an interim U.S. Attorney without Senate approval. Ostensibly, the provision was intended to be used in situations where national security might be at stake, such as the death of a sitting U.S. Attorney resulting from a terrorist attack.

As early as last summer, Justice Department officials worried that Griffin’s past as an opposition researcher for the Republicans might make him unconfirmable. (A Justice Department staffer wrote in an e-mail, in reference to the plan to install Griffin, “We have a senator prob.”) In congressional hearings last month, Mark Pryor, a Democratic senator from Arkansas, raised concerns about newspaper accounts of Griffin’s political work, which, he said, has “been characterized as ‘caging’ African-American votes. This arises from allegations that Mr. Griffin and others in the R.N.C. were targeting African-Americans in Florida for voter challenges during the 2004 Presidential campaign.”

Last week, Griffin was intent upon defending himself against the charge of suppressing minority votes. “Caging is not a derogatory term,” he said, as soon as he got on the phone.“It’s a direct-mail term. It derives from caging categories of mail in steel shelves and files.” He said that the implication that he had run an operation to suppress African-American voters, which could be a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was “false and close to libelous.” (News accounts suggest that one reason that some of the purged U.S. Attorneys were fired is that Republican officials had complained to the Administration that they weren’t energetic enough about investigating “voter fraud”—political shorthand, critics say, for delegitimatizing minority votes.)

Few U.S. Attorneys are better equipped than Griffin to dodge incoming political artillery, because few have launched more of it themselves. As Griffin put it in a BBC documentary called “Digging the Dirt,” which featured the opposition research outfit that he helped run for George Bush in his Presidential race against Al Gore, in 2000, “We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. . . . We make the bullets.” The documentary showed Griffin leading a team of researchers focussed on spotting inconsistencies, no matter how inconsequential, in Gore’s statements, and packaging them for the media.

In 2004, Griffin reprised the role, leading the behind-the-scenes effort to disseminate negative information about John Kerry, the Democratic Presidential nominee. As Rove’s protégé, he set up a boiler-room rapid-response operation at 129 Portland Street, in Boston. Security was tight, with guards and a buzzer system. Upstairs, thirty operatives worked in a maze of offices filled with computers and TVs. Among other things, the Republicans scrutinized Kerry’s parking violations and unearthed old gossip items and tabloid accounts of his troubled first marriage.

On the phone, Griffin suggested that his experience with the media would be an asset in his new job. “A lot of what I do is communications,” he said. “It’s no different than in the campaign.”

Senator Pryor doesn’t see things that way. “Doing opposition research shouldn’t disqualify a person from being a U.S. Attorney,” he said. “But the question is what political activities he did—and did he break the law? Were they suppressing the African-American vote? He says not, but that’s why we need confirmation hearings.” Pryor said that the Attorney General had assured him in a phone call that he wanted Griffin to face Senate confirmation. But now, Pryor said, “the e-mails show it was just the opposite. The truth is, I was lied to.” As a result, last week Pryor, who was one of only six Democratic senators to support Gonzales’s nomination and confirmation as Attorney General, joined the call for his resignation. He has also co-sponsored legislation that, if passed, will force Griffin to undergo a retroactive confirmation hearing.

“I’m not interested in that,” Griffin said. “I don’t feel bad about the work we did. I’m proud of it. It’s research! It’s their record—I didn’t make anything up.” But as a man whose headquarters during the 2000 campaign was decorated with a banner that read, “Unleash Hell on Al,” he seemed to realize that he would most likely have to face the same kind of treatment that he is known for dishing out. Given that Democrats now rule the Senate, he asked, “Do you think I could get a fair hearing?”